The future of retail sales is always changing to serve the ever-changing consumer. That simple. Whether we like it or not, retail will always be challenging, innovative, dynamic, fast and the one who decides what is good or bad, what stays or what dies is the eternal king: the consumer.
Therefore, talking about the future is always talking about some trends that are appealing to this new modern consumer. We can summarize these trends in: experience, convenience and services. Keep reading to check out what the future of retail sales has in store for us.
What are the trends for the future of retail sales?
Currently, 300000 businesses make up the UK retail sector, according to data from brc.org.uk. In 2019, retail sales in the UK were worth £439 billion, according to the same source. But what can we expect for the future of retail?
Here are three trends that will be striking in this new decade:
1) Retail sales experience
The store will increasingly be a place to be and no longer a necessary place to purchase a product and service. For the satisfaction of an emerging need there will be a virtual assistant who will make the purchase without your intervention and most likely they will buy faster, cheaper and with incredible assertiveness.
Visiting the store will be an option for anyone who wants to socialize in a more human sense of the term, to meet people, have new experiences, feel something unusual, expand sensory knowledge, hear new things, perceive movement. And this experience can be different for each consumer. This is something that online stores can’t offer, I mean not the same experience anyway.
2) Convenience
Increasingly, time is the precious commodity of the new century, so anything that saves the customer time will be duly rewarded by the new consumer in the future of retail sales. Think of all the actions you can take to help your customer in this regard during the purchase journey.
You must think of measures to provide such convenience to the customer, from the initial stage of the client’s need discovery until the acquisition and use of your products and services. At each part of the journey, there may be a series of things that you will have to do, to meet each specific need of your business.
3) Services
A retail business has always been a service provider for the consumer. Perhaps the perception of this is that it was not clear in the mind of the retailer. But, in fact, the retailer has always been a curator, a selector of merchandise with quality and price for its customer profile.
Currently, their roles have been expanded. In addition to curation, the shopkeeper had to learn how to display goods, create pleasant environments, recruit, manage and motivate teams, choose the best commercial spots in the city and many other services that were incorporated into his list of responsibilities.
In any case, providing services is in the retailer’s DNA and it will be increasingly necessary in the future of retail to use a process and tools that guarantee the execution of these services with quality.
How to adapt to new trends?
To deliver more and more good experience, convenience and services in the future of retail, you, the retailer, must automate your processes using a vast number of tools at your disposal.
Increasingly, retail will have to incorporate new technologies that are already in the hands of the new consumer, such as the internet and smartphones. Doing a digital transformation of retail, that is, having an e-commerce, offering an omnichannel experience, where the customer can buy their products on the web and pick them up in the store, will just be the new normal in the future. Thus, the client will benefit from the fast experience of the ecommerce, and still get the chance to socialize a little later on. The idea is to be more daring in order to be relevant in the future of retail.
And how to go to the future of retail now?
There are many service providers out there to help you, the retailer, keep up to date with retail trends and thus offer the best experience for your customers.
Such providers will help you the most with an omnichannel integration platform that works as a marketplace integration hub, e-commerce hub and ERP integrator.
It allows physical stores to become virtual stores integrated with the largest marketplaces in the UK, without changing retail management software or e-commerce platform.
Manage your physical and virtual stock in an integrated way and your omnichannel sales centrally.
Thus, you digitize your retail, reduce operating costs and increase your profit in a practical and safe way!
